Computing devices, such as notebook computers, personal data assistants (PDAs), kiosks, and mobile handsets, have user interface devices, which are also known as human interface devices (HID). One user interface device that has become more common is a touch-sensor pad (also commonly referred to as a touchpad). A basic notebook computer touch-sensor pad emulates the function of a personal computer (PC) mouse. A touch-sensor pad is typically embedded into a PC notebook for built-in portability. A touch-sensor pad replicates mouse X/Y movement by using two defined axes which contain a collection of sensor elements that detect the position of one or more conductive objects, such as a finger. Mouse right/left button clicks can be replicated by two mechanical buttons, located in the vicinity of the touchpad, or by tapping commands on the touch-sensor pad itself. The touch-sensor pad provides a user interface device for performing such functions as positioning a pointer, or selecting an item on a display. These touch-sensor pads may include multi-dimensional sensor arrays for detecting movement in multiple axes. The sensor array may include a one-dimensional sensor array, detecting movement in one axis. The sensor array may also be two dimensional, detecting movements in two axes.
Another user interface device that has become more common is a touch screen. Touch screens, also known as touchscreens, touch windows, touch panels, or touchscreen panels, are transparent display overlays which are typically either pressure-sensitive (resistive or piezoelectric), electrically-sensitive (capacitive), acoustically-sensitive (surface acoustic wave (SAW)) or photo-sensitive (infra-red). The effect of such overlays allows a display to be used as an input device, removing the keyboard and/or the mouse as the primary input device for interacting with the display's content. Such displays can be attached to computers or, as terminals, to networks. Touch screens have become familiar in retail settings, on point-of-sale systems, on ATMs, on mobile handsets, on kiosks, on game consoles, and on PDAs where a stylus is sometimes used to manipulate the graphical user interface (GUI) and to enter data. A user can touch a touch screen or a touch-sensor pad to manipulate data. For example, a user can apply a single touch, by using a finger to touch the surface of a touch screen, to select an item from a menu.
A certain class of touch sense arrays includes a first set of linear electrodes separated and a second set of electrodes arranged at right angles and separated by a dielectric layer. The resulting intersections form a two-dimensional array of capacitors, referred to as sense elements. Touch sense arrays can be scanned in several ways, one of which (mutual-capacitance sensing) permits individual capacitive elements to be measured. Another method (self-capacitance sensing) can measure an entire sensor strip, or even an entire sensor array, with less information about a specific location, but performed with a single read operation.
The two-dimensional array of capacitors, when placed in close proximity, provides a means for sensing touch. A conductive object, such as a finger or a stylus, coming in close proximity to the touch sense array causes changes in the total capacitances of the sense elements in proximity to the conductive object. These changes in capacitance can be measured to produce a “two-dimensional map” that indicates where the touch on the array has occurred.
One way to measure such capacitance changes is to form a circuit comprising a signal driver (e.g., an AC current or a voltage source (transmit or “TX signal”)) which is applied to each horizontally aligned conductor in a multiplexed fashion. The charge accumulated on each of the capacitive intersections are sensed and similarly scanned at each of the vertically aligned electrodes in synchronization with the applied current/voltage source. This charge is then measured, typically with a form of charge-to-voltage converter (i.e., receive or “RX signal”), which is sampled-and-held for an A/D converter to convert to digital form for input to a processor. The processor, in turn, renders the capacitive map and determines the location of a touch.
Conventional capacitive sensing driving circuits suffer from a number of deficiencies. The driving or “TX signal” is frequently a square wave operated from an integrated circuit's (IC's) supply voltage, e.g., 2.5V. Unfortunately, the magnitude of the resulting TX signals for measuring a capacitance change between electrodes of the touch sense array may be on the order of a few percent. Since TX signal circuits are often noisy, it becomes difficult to distinguish a measured signal due to the TX signal component from a noise signal component. As a result, such measurements have a low signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio.
If a larger TX signal is used, the sensitivity of the sensing circuit increases proportionally (since system and environmental noise stays the same). Thus, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) can be improved by raising the TX voltage. Producing a TX voltage higher than the supply voltage of an IC requires a boosting circuit. A conventional method to achieve that boost is to employ a charge pump. A charge pump uses multiple stages to raise the voltage across a capacitor above the supply voltage. More stages result in a higher TX voltage. The last stage of the charge pump then produces a final voltage and stores it in a “tank” or “reservoir” capacitor. A load can then be connected to that capacitor.
In a touch application, the resulting RX signal typically includes a large amount of ripple noise due to the pumping action of the stages in the charge pump, which operate in the MHz frequency range. To reduce noise from ripple and other sources, the final “tank” or “reservoir” capacitor is fairly large: on the order of a few nF or more. Such a capacitor generally cannot be implemented on-chip and is therefore cost-prohibitive.